What if you owned two goldfish? And yes, they lived in a fish bowl on the shelf in the lounge room, year after year and, yeah! You developed a deep attachment to them, but because you had secretly fallen out of love, feeding them had become a drag and you thought they were becoming obese anyway, and they had done the same old tricks for all those years (depending on their mood, and I am sure they would have been moody as hell) and you possibly stopped hearing the praise of your pets from your guests.

I doubt many people over coffee remark, ‘My! They’re well behaved’, and you further justified your choice by saying you have developed a better sense of what the fish want and need and they will be better off, they will be happier, maybe. You evict them (cold and heart wrenching stuff).

Well, actually, you rubbed salt into their wounds (I am sure the two fish concerned would be aware of what is going on) by bringing home a brand new fish and a you beaut multi-facetted fish tank. Then put the others in a container on the floor in the lounge room for two weeks before finally relocating them in a neighbor”s pond without telling them, the fish or the neighbors, whence, when they are finally discovered, they will either be classified as miracles, freaks of nature or squatters or dead.

And what if I say, it is funny how some people look like their pets and you say that some pets reflect their owners personalities and then I say that it is rumored that cats can see spirits. What if?

Nothing moved, save a tendril of her hair
nothing moved to save me from that stare
nothing moved showing my mistake
nothing moved revealing my fate
nothing moved, save a tendril of her hair
nothing to save me from that stare.

No need asking ‘what if?’ Now.

Hello, I must tell you I am not as familiar with the date as I should be. I know it is Monday and it is nine in the evening. Now let me run this past you. First, you have to believe this is possible, though there have been examples of this sort of thing (inevitable activism).

Just imagine that one morning you run out of petrol and you don”t bother getting any more and what if your neighbor ran out and did not get any more and this concept gained momentum and people just did not operate because they had run out of petrol. The kids did not go to school unless they walked and we did not get to work unless the boss organised it and we did not go to shops which may or may not be open. What would happen?

I seriously doubt it would ever get to that point, and if it did? I wonder whether this could effect the smooth running of the country. I would imagine that certain sections would be inconvenienced. I don”t know that anyone would die but as cars built up on the sides of roads and the operation of things became strained and a little bit thicker to wade through, I wonder if it kept growing whether that would change anything.

It is a silly idea and it probably would not work, and to explain why it wouldn”t reveals a whole lot of really base concepts all pertaining to individual choices that really go against the grain, as far as this countries basic Christian concepts are concerned (the problem with demo, capo lifestyle).

Today”s population is very geared up to having everything instantly on hand and not seeing imperfections or realizing that individuals are powerful and can make change if they (and there it is) choose to lose their individualness and become larger than one. The human race will not have one winner. Lets just hope that the one winner is the human race.

If there really was a need for the population to pull together, who do you think would be in the best position to get through it? Plane trips to other places would still happen for those egotistically minded enough to think they had a really good reason to go, and we (the buggers going without) would possibly be the excuse for them to keep doing it, and it might be necessary to talk with other dignitaries. But what of phones? Won’t happen! I should perhaps be a little less gloomy, so here goes.

Good morning. Well I am truly happy another day and it is cold and overcast. The wind adds an attraction. The official interest rate has started its crawl towards double figures. Heating is more expensive so I will not turn it on. And I have to visit my friend so you can read this, but petrol is expensive so it might not happen as I have not got any energy as a result of an inadequate diet. Adequate nutrition is also becoming more expensive.

I am watching Mr. Beazley at the Press Club. He is not as humorous as mister SANTA MARIA. Not if you turn the sound down, however, if you did, as I did this time, you turned the sound back up .It was more funny. But it is not funny, is it? No. it is not.

Then again, no! What I think is that at least Mister Beazley combs his hair, but it was just rhetoric (what did you have for lunch? not what he had ! I bet). He speaks for the middle class. His membership had lapsed. What membership? His membership of the Press Club. Heh, he smiled, Mister middle class Australia, and they signed him up again. Are you a member?

He did not know about it, oh boy! Not another example, more an opportunity. What a performer and, I give it six. I would like to make mention of the passing of a man, a priest for sixty-five years, who I met when I was living in the Saint Brigid’s parish.

This particular man did not ever know what a source of comfort and stability he was and how he is missed. He was mentor and sponsor of the MIGHTY MIDGETS under seven rugby team of which Laurie Fisher (the coach of the Brumbies rugby team) was the captain. He was loved and admired by his parishioners and has left a large pair of shoes to fill. He will be and always has been fondly remembered.

Okay. I have been very patient with this disparity thing that keeps popping up, in order to remind us that we are all the same but we are not the same, and it is obvious because there is always the haves and the have notsI I know that a lot of people are not from my generation (they are of it) and probably don”t know what I am talking about (lucky I am patient). I will give you a quick history lesson.

Once upon a time Canberra, apart from being the Capital, was also administered by the Federal Government, and the unaware population forgot that it was just a sleepy little bush town and were caught up with the rah rah which surrounded politics. There really did not seem to be any choice, as the government paid the population to run around and loosely and wrongly gave them a job title, public servant.

The alternative was to get further education, work really hard somewhere else, and save up, get married, settle down, have kids and die. For all intents and purposes, the natives were forgotten. But not by the rest of the country, who envied the so-called upper class lifestyle, somewhere here, and thought the local population should not bludge off the government.

So after a time, somebody suggested that we would be better off if we were administered by a more local body. Then we got self government and this then meant that we had our own little Parliament and an equivalent to a Premier, who we called a Chief Minister, but really there was a vast difference because the equivalents looked after States, our government only looks after this city.

As a result of creating a similar, look-alike government, the individuals duly set about copying the same solutions to their problems as the other states did and they forgot they only had to administer a city, but still managed to overspend their budget, so they set about collecting revenue. Suddenly they remembered that they had a city of international importance so they reasoned that they could charge the population for parking cars, for instance.

They did not make guarantees about car park safety by providing booms or barriers, not even a fence of any kind as they do in pay parking concerns, merely used them as benchmarks for what you can get from people who do park. These car parking concerns operating in other cities operated on the basis that people from all over the states accessed the city and therefore there was a rationale, however, did the copiers do any maths?

No, they ignored the fact that we were only a city and that our suburban shopping centers had courtesy car parks provided, and decided that because we were the Nation’s Capital (they remembered again), every driver in the country needed a car park. Ergo they charge for them and they still can’t get the budget right (they forget again).